A Constant Choice
by CampionSayn
Summary: After rescue and recovery, a return to a favor comes about. It was unlikely that it would happen, but it did, and now both can just be. Third and last in a one-shot trilogy of TWxPG.


Title: A Constant Choice.  
Summary: After rescue and recovery, a return to a favor comes about. It was unlikely that it would happen, but it did, and now both can just be. Third and last in a one-shot trilogy of TWxPG.  
Disclaimer: I don't own Legion of Superheroes, any characters included in this work of fandom and I make no money off of this.  
Warning: Mentions of blood, injury, hinted assault, Brin/Tinya, etc.  
Dedication: Written for many people, but especially **kaithelonechampion** for making the prompt to make this into a trilogy in the first place and to hurry up about it. I haven't fallen into LOSH for months, but this seemed suitable for the month of April where I live, where it is still freezing and the skies are grey.

* * *

_-:-  
…To be kind, to be proud, to be fearless…  
-Vladimir Nabokov._

* * *

_Retracting waves of trauma the color of coarse Connemara ponies on their islands covered in painted clay with intoxication and burning sanguine fluid._

Brin was not certain why he was so calm, covered in his own blood (and hers) still and just sitting at the end of the hospital bed in his muddy clothes, making the pale white bed covers grungy and disgusting. Perhaps it had something to do with all of his adrenaline going buh-bye an hour ago and all the anger seeping out of him. Dust in the wind and all his bones like drying candle wax.

_An attack of a stinging, dark purple hornet in and upon a nest of clean and elegant bumblebees for no reason other than to attract the attentions of soldier moths and bees that come when called._

Absently, he continued to look upon Tinya, face and the rest of her—her stomach especially, _why _not—cut up of and alike to Autumn leaves in the air and bandages on the most thoroughly stinging-ringing-painful parts to keep her from falling about which way and that. She had lost consciousness before he had gotten to the Legion cruiser, but just after the fine wolf man and herself had sent that uninvited guest back to where they had once been and where the trespasser had been trying to leave only to conquer their universe. The needle in her arm pumped her full of enough sedative to last the night and longer if necessary.

_A lone white orb in the sky that lacks the comfort of the stars in the blackness of space._

Didn't make Brin feel any better about it.

_Warms scalpels in the hand, suture lines that curve in and among themselves to seal a wound and more, doctors that—while even nice, friendly and compassionate—seem to think of themselves always confident and ultimately too wise for the liking of people who cannot so much as write on a double-sealed paper and give pills that can bring good or ill._

Brainy and Violet had said that her surgery had gone splendidly and she would be alright. They had said that, given that the attacker had not known what he was really aiming for—how can you know, really what can hurt someone else, when you live in a dimension where there are no solid bearings and nothing to hurt or focus on, unless it is the psychosis of one's mind—Tinya had maintained only the most minimal damage; despite how it looked to Brin. All that blood lost could be replenished and the lost skin and organ matter would grow back easily with the other drugs they had to give her as soon as she was stable enough to give them to.

_A bed sheet peaking upward, claws tickling, chewing and gnawing with little to do with the intention of the affliction of pain of the self._

Even so…Brin just kept biting the indentation he had snapped into his lip during the fight, worrying his tooth into what tasted like puss and kept rubbing Tinya's toe that hid underneath the bedspread.

_Sheer pride showing from one living being to another simply on the grounds of merit, rather than status that can only be attained by "proper" breeding._

"All things considering," Brin said more to Tinya than just the empty, sterile room, "You held your own better than I would have."

_A flicker of the memory from one shadow and synapse and the brain to another, faster and more efficient than any other electrical current in the galaxy, no matter how lackluster in flash and bang and power._

And she had, really. Brin himself could not face that dark mauve wearing, British sounding, Superman-similarly-powered being at all during the fight to protect president Wazzo and her council. He did try, there was little doubt among those in the Legion that had greeted him that he had tried, certainly, but he lost and got thrown into a building and the trees the second he tried to launch a physical attack. The other man had flicked him away like he was a bug and Tinya had been forced repeatedly over two hours to shift to phantom mode and then hit the other as often as possible while Brin (for the first time in a long time since he was always a part of a round-house, physical battle) had been forced to find what the unwanted being had used to get into their dimension in the first place and then switch a great many buttons and knobs to reverse it and send the man back. They had managed to keep innocents—not least of all the president—from being hurt, but not before the other being had gotten lucky in grabbing Tinya before she could phase out, knocked her unconscious and then proceeded to toss her through some plate-glass windows and rebar poking out of the holes he'd made in surrounding buildings.

_The billow of a white knight facing off and running away and dissipating along the outer grooves of what, in an instance, could either be the outline of a great, massive, thunder starved whale swimming through the blue background or could also be an electric eel storing lightning that will strike down from above on either an inanimate object or a being holding enough water to be attractive._

Glancing outside, Brin could look at the clouds for a moment as they moved with the wind away from the horizon that showcased the sun just over the land mass beneath it, getting ready to retire for the day. It was a pretty sight and took his mind off of things (almost everything, except for the feel of Tinya's toe gripped between his fingers) for a moment. Enough of a moment to catch his own oxygen, anyway. And to taste that it was going to rain soon as the air came through his senses and enriched his insides in passing.

_A spike in a red line that can serve as the only real sign of intelligence when a person's body has gone to sleep for healings sake. A bright light in the dark of mortal doubt._

The machine that Tinya was hooked up to with tens and tons more wiring than Brin himself had the last time he'd been in the med-ward alerted the wolfman that she was coming around, even before her toes twitched a little in his hand and he bore witness to her eyebrows scrunching together in discomfort. His ears drew back a little and he got up from where he was sitting to travel to the left side of her, hand following atop her form and atop the sheet; touching her from toes to kneecap, kneecap to hipbone, hipbone (a fine thing to touch, even when separated by cloth) to shoulder and then, finally, slithering to the groove of her tiny, tiny hand. His thumb moved back and forth along her wrist.

_Rickets and rivets of the mind catching up to the pain of the body, but unable to fully comprehend the whole of the suffering because of REM and exhaustion._

Self hatred comes to Brin (for no reason he will be able to explain) as Tinya made a keening noise in what must have been the crying in her nightmares as she started wiggling a little in her bed. The wiggling could not be good for her, this much Brin knew and, absently, he brought both hands up and smoothed the skin from along her temples, around her eyes and both his powerful, terrifyingly large palms came to rest under her chin and calm her just ever so slightly enough to keep her from moving and ruining her current condition even more from the nightmare.

_Hair black as ebony window panes, skin as pale as snow, lips as red as blood, observed and considered over by a being of valiant heart with good intentions. Royalty does not need to add into the equations._

"Easy, Princess," he soothed, twin thumbs moving up and about from the rim of her jaw line and up to her eyes; then back again, "I'm here."

_An idea, small but substantial, comes about and is acted upon._

Taking the matter of Tinya's comfort more into his hands than just holding her face (it wasn't a problem, really, and propriety be damned), Brin carefully slipped into the bed beside her, under the sheets so they were skin to skin. If she were awake, perhaps, he would never have done it, but being that she is in pain and indeed asleep and unaware, he will take the chance. Timber Wolf carefully wrapped one arm under her pillow so her head was elevated and his spare hand entwined with her fingers. Her head and body contorted in sleep just enough so her forehead pressed into his Adam's Apple and he could feel her chest rise and fall in breathing that did not clue to her being miserable in her slumber any longer.

_Inhalation, exhalation, encompassed by absolute exhaustion._

After a day and half of not sleeping and having sustained some blood loss before arriving back at Legion with Tinya unconscious and himself worried as sick as anything at all that had ever felt a modicum of conscious, Brin allowed himself to submit to sleep. He would not doubt that whoever came to check on them later would be surprised, but as Tinya's heartbeat sounded on one of the monitors attached to her, he found he didn't really give a damn.

_The Beast doesn't have to be the one to save Beauty. Beauty, in turn, doesn't have to be the one to save the Beast. Sometimes the saving is a mutual choice._


End file.
